Jane recently received a request from a niece to sponsor her on one of those package holidays to an exotic location to do something vaguely adventurous "for charity"

I thought her reply was absolutely spot-on; here it is:

Dear xxxxx

Thank you for your email. Its great to hear that you want to do something to help people in the poor countries of the world. I would be delighted to bung you a few quid  if you just give me the right answer to this question - how are you getting there? Not flying I hope. If the answer is no - hurrah, you've got your money and can skip to the end of this email. If the answer is yes please could you give me a few moments of your time and read on.

I recently noticed that my trusty old Sony z530i phone battery was needing charging everythree days instead of once a week, so since my contract with O2 had run its full 18 months I thought I'd see if therewas a replacement as good.

I've got a perfectly good filofax for mobile office use, and a small laptop for email and calaendars (though only manual calendar sync with the filofax is available), and a good digital SLR with proper lenses for decent phots so I don't really need anything but a phone.